Tourism: Northumberland

Max Wilkinson Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) on securing this important debate. I am fortunate enough to have enjoyed tourism in Northumberland very recently; I stayed in Longframlington and Hexham with my wife and daughter, where we visited Hadrian’s wall. During the few days we spent there, we also visited Lindisfarne, from where we took home a bottle of spiced mead. I can recommend it to Members seeking ideas for an alternative Christmas tipple that would be popular with Vikings and monks alike. We enjoyed time at Bamburgh castle, Alnwick castle and Warkworth. At Bamburgh, we saw the exhibition about “The Last Kingdom”, which prompted us to start watching that series on Netflix. If there were a competition for UK castles, Northumberland would surely be the premier league.

Liberal Democrats believe that tourism is the lifeblood of the UK economy. The UK contains a rich tapestry of destinations beyond our capital cities, ranging from traditional bucket-and-spade resorts such as Blackpool to creative hotspots such as Brighton, rural retreats such as the Lake district and modern city attractions such as Hull. If our tourism industry is to flourish, more focus is needed. We must all work, as the Minister alluded to in the previous debate, to rebalance tourism away from London; that is why this debate is so important. Doing so would benefit not only Northumberland, but also my constituency, Cheltenham, which welcomed 2 million visitors in 2022—an influx that supports around 4% of local jobs. Many of those are found in Cheltenham’s excellent hospitality sector, as will be the case in any tourism destination, and most of those businesses will be small and medium-sized enterprises.

The previous Government let small businesses down badly and took them for granted. When businesses needed certainty and stability during the recovery from the pandemic and the energy bills crisis, the chaotic approach of the previous Government made things so much worse. Liberal Democrats have called for a complete overhaul of the unfair business rates system, replacing it with a commercial landowner levy based on the land value of commercial sites rather than their entire capital value, thereby stimulating investment and shifting the burden of taxation from tenants to landowners. That this new Government are exploring changing the broken business rates system is positive and we welcome it, but small and medium-sized businesses need action sooner rather than later—they need it now, and much more urgently as a result of the decision to reduce the retail, hospitality and leisure business rates relief from 75% to 40%.

At the weekend, I visited Emma, the landlady of the Hewlett Arms. She told me that it currently feels as if the Government still do not quite understand properly how the hospitality sector works. She thought that the contribution of independents in the hospitality sector needed to be better acknowledged, and that the combined impact of the Budget, alongside cost differentials between pubs and supermarkets in particular, meant that her job was getting significantly harder. I am sure that applies to many places in tourism destinations, including in Northumberland. I am certain that the new Government have a vision for tourism, having heard about it in the previous debate. I cannot promise the Minister that I will agree on every single point, but I will always aim for the compassionate, creative and constructive approach of the monks at Lindisfarne rather than that of a Viking invader.